A Personal Robocar With a Foldable Steering Wheel
Tensor's personal Robocar is a Level 4 vehicle with a foldable steering wheel, retractable pedals and 8,000+ TOPS of onboard computing. Not yet on sale.
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Tensor
A Personal Robocar With a Foldable Steering Wheel
Tensor, a San Jose company, introduces its vehicle with the line "Hello, World! I'm Tensor. Earth's first personal Robocar." The Robocar is a large SUV, 217.5 inches long with a 124.0-inch wheelbase and five seats. Tensor describes it as a personal Level 4 vehicle, a car that drives itself within approved zones with no supervision, and as "the world's first personal vehicle designed entirely around AI perception." Outside those zones, the driver takes over or switches to assisted driving. The site gives no purchase date. Visitors can sign up for early notice of availability.
How It Sees
Tensor lists five lidars, including one it calls the Tensor Halo, "the world's highest-resolution automotive-grade lidar," plus four Sentinel lidars for blind spots. Lidar is a sensor that measures distance with laser light. The car also has 17 exterior cameras at 17 megapixels and six Trinova radars. Four microphone arrays listen for emergency sirens and locate them, often before the vehicle is visible, according to the page. Each lidar and camera has its own wipers, washers and defroster so the view stays clear.
How It Decides
The driving software is a transformer-based model that handles perception, prediction and planning. Tensor says it is "entirely data-driven," trained by imitation learning, which means it copies the actions of expert human drivers. A fast system handles real-time driving, and a slower visual language model reasons through rare situations. Both run onboard on eight NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor chips, which the page credits with more than 8,000 TOPS, a measure of trillions of operations per second. Primary, secondary and emergency layers back one another up, and a minimal risk maneuver guides the car to a safe state.
A Cabin That Changes Shape
In autonomous mode the steering wheel folds away in seconds, adding about six inches of space, and the pedals retract. For manual driving the wheel returns as a heated yoke. It is a redundant drive-by-wire design, meaning no mechanical link joins the wheel to the road wheels. The open cabin has no traditional center console. Front seats recline to 175° and offer heating, cooling and massage, and the page lists 29 storage spaces. The page also lists big-bed configurations, camp and rest modes, and a Pet Mode.
Battery, Charging and Safety Targets
A 112 kWh battery sits on an 845-volt system. Tensor claims 5C charging, taking the battery from 20% to 80% in about 10 minutes, and the page gives no total range figure. Steering and braking are redundant by wire and stated to meet ISO 26262 ASIL D, a safety level for vehicle electronics. Run-flat tires allow an hour at 45 mph after a puncture. Tensor's Safety page lists standards it is working toward, not certifications obtained. Its cybersecurity management system, however, was certified to ISO/SAE 21434 on September 28, 2026.
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